Even now he did not distinctly hear the freezing negative that those scholared walls had echoed to his desire.
The failure to find another lodging, and the lack of room in this house for his father, had made a deep impression on the boy—a brooding undemonstrative horror seemed to have seized him.
The silence was broken by his saying:
"Mother, what shall we do to-morrow!"
"I don't know!" said Sue despondently.
"I am afraid this will trouble your father."
"I wish Father was quite well, and there had been room for him!
Then it wouldn't matter so much!
Poor Father!"
"It wouldn't!"
"Can I do anything?"
"No!
All is trouble, adversity, and suffering!"
"Father went away to give us children room, didn't he?"
"Partly."
"It would be better to be out o' the world than in it, wouldn't it?"
"It would almost, dear."
"'Tis because of us children, too, isn't it, that you can't get a good lodging?"
"Well—people do object to children sometimes."
"Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have 'em?"
"Oh—because it is a law of nature."
"But we don't ask to be born?"
"No indeed."
"And what makes it worse with me is that you are not my real mother, and you needn't have had me unless you liked.
I oughtn't to have come to 'ee—that's the real truth!
I troubled 'em in Australia, and I trouble folk here.
I wish I hadn't been born!"
"You couldn't help it, my dear."
"I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should be killed directly, before their souls come to 'em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about!"
Sue did not reply. She was doubtfully pondering how to treat this too reflective child.
She at last concluded that, so far as circumstances permitted, she would be honest and candid with one who entered into her difficulties like an aged friend.
"There is going to be another in our family soon," she hesitatingly remarked.
"How?"
"There is going to be another baby."
"What!"
The boy jumped up wildly.
"Oh God, Mother, you've never a-sent for another; and such trouble with what you've got!"
"Yes, I have, I am sorry to say!" murmured Sue, her eyes glistening with suspended tears.
The boy burst out weeping.
"Oh you don't care, you don't care!" he cried in bitter reproach.
"How ever could you, Mother, be so wicked and cruel as this, when you needn't have done it till we was better off, and Father well!
To bring us all into more trouble!
No room for us, and Father a-forced to go away, and we turned out to-morrow; and yet you be going to have another of us soon! …
'Tis done o' purpose!—'tis—'tis!"
He walked up and down sobbing.
"Y-you must forgive me, little Jude!" she pleaded, her bosom heaving now as much as the boy's.
"I can't explain—I will when you are older. It does seem—as if I had done it on purpose, now we are in these difficulties!
I can't explain, dear! But it—is not quite on purpose—I can't help it!"
"Yes it is—it must be!
For nobody would interfere with us, like that, unless you agreed!